who had taken up residence in the metropolis of Amerika were seen as the real embodiment of the capitalistic Moloch.16
The very name of America in such circles suggests everything that is “grotesque, obscene, monstrous, stultifying, stunted, leveling, deadening, deracinating, deforming, rootless, uncultured, and—always in quotation marks—“free.” As previously shown, this “metaphysical” America existed almost from the beginning of the nation, and it became entwined with an equally metaphysical opposite: America, the land of freedom and of the future. These opposite images created ambiguous perceptions of America, and those who saw the New World from afar did so with ambivalence. Adolf Hitler, like so many Germans, absorbed both images of America and never resolved them in his own mind. America, the progressive, technological society, coexisted in his mind with Amerika, the land of degeneration.
Hitler’s Knowledge of America
The consensus concerning Hitler’s image of America still holds that he was abysmally ignorant and badly informed about conditions in America.17 There is little truth in this judgment. Hitler’s view of America was not as uninformed as many of his biographers and historians have written. He read widely, if often indiscriminately. His basic intelligence was definitely above average. He was an autodidact who had immersed himself in a wide variety of geopolitical, military, artistic, and technological sources. His knowledge of geography was excellent and he impressed Arnold Toynbee with his mastery of history. Hitler left school at sixteen and never made it beyond the fourth form of secondary school (Realschule). By contrast, Roosevelt received a degree from Harvard, attended Columbia University law school, and passed the New York bar examination. Hitler had to repeat the first grade of Realschule in Linz and was dismissed from school for repeated poor performance. He then attended one more year of Realschule in Steyr, where he failed several subjects and was only promoted after he retook the examination. Hitler also twice failed his entrance examination to the Academy of Arts in Vienna. Yet Hitler’s failures should not blind us to his quick intelligence, stupendous memory, and other abilities. He was, as one of his teachers, Dr. Eduard Hümer, testified at his trial in 1923, definitely talented but lacking in discipline and was “notoriously cantankerous, willful, arrogant, and irascible.”18
Hitler’s reading habits were haphazard. He took from books mostly those elements that could be made to fit his convictions. He was not unwilling to learn new things, but he took shortcuts to knowledge by reading biased pamphlets and newspapers or by listening to eccentric “experts.” Hitler did not like bureaucrats, especially those who ran the German Foreign Office. He did not trust them, and he did not read their reports. As he put it, in one of his typical outbursts against diplomats, “What did our diplomats report before the Great War? Nothing! And during the War? Nothing! It’s the same with others [bureaucrats]. Public offices must be reformed from the ground up. I received better insights from people like Colin Ross and others who have traveled around.”19 His reference to Colin Ross, the popular German globetrotter and travel guide, is important because it was to people like him rather than government experts that he lent an ear. Apart from inherited stereotypes shared by many Germans, Hitler’s information about America was gained from conversations he had with Germans who had traveled to the United States or lived there for an extended period of time. Of Hitler’s sources of information about the United States there are at least six that can be documented with some degree of accuracy. The first, which can be traced back to Hitler’s childhood, were the western novels written by Karl May (1842–1912). Other information about America came from Ernst (“Putzi”) Hanfstaengl, Kurt Lüdecke, Colin Ross, Friedrich Bötticher, and Fritz Wiedemann. The novelist Karl May did not set foot in the New World until he had already written his western stories and enjoyed wide popular acclaim as an “expert” on world affairs. Hanfstaengl was a scion of a well-known Munich family, a Harvard graduate, and an early Hitler follower. Lüdecke, a shadowy “businessman,” paid several extended visits to America and hoped to educate the führer on conditions there. Ross was a best-selling journalist who wrote travel books on America, the Western Hemisphere, and the Far East. Bötticher was Hitler’s only military attaché who reported from the German embassy in Washington, D.C. Finally, Fritz Wiedemann was Hitler’s superior in World War I, his personal adjutant, and later German consul to San Francisco. To what extent was Hitler influenced by their judgment of the United States?
In the spring of 1912, an eccentric young wastrel, down on his luck and living in a Home for the Homeless in Vienna, borrowed a good pair of shoes from an acquaintance in order to attend a much-advertised lecture by Karl May, titled “Upward into the Empire of Noble Humanity—Empor ins Reich der Edelmenschen.”20 When the young man, Adolf Hitler, arrived at the packed auditorium, holding close to three thousand spectators, he was thrilled to see his favorite childhood author, a man who had only recently caused considerable scandal when it was discovered that he had spent jail time for theft and fraud as a young man and, even more scandalous, had never visited any of the countries he described in such detail in his novels and travel accounts. All of this made no difference to young Hitler, who vehemently defended Karl May against charges by his compatriots at the Home for the Homeless that his idol was a fraud. Those who were making such accusations, Hitler said, forgot that May was a great writer. As far as he was concerned, May’s accusers were nothing but “hyenas and goons.”
Interestingly enough, May’s lecture was dedicated to the peace movement associated with the pacifist Bertha von Suttner, to whom he had dedicated his recent book Peace on Earth, and who sat in the first row of the Sofiensaal on that evening of March 22, 1912. May was really a utopian progressive who dreamt of an empire of peace and justice that would nourish a higher and nobler type of human being, an Edelmensch who would redeem the human race from its bondage to violence, greed, and oppression. He even referred to himself as a spiritual aviator soaring higher and higher into the Promised Land.21 Those who attended that night thought they would be treated to recitations of May’s adventure stories or a travelogue taking them to faraway lands; instead, the famous writer waxed philosophical about noble humans. In the end, it made little difference. May received an enthusiastic reaction from the audience that included Hitler.
The fact is that May, who died just two weeks after this lecture, was already a national, even European, icon, and people saw in his works whatever they wanted to see in them. This explains the remarkable reaction to May’s stories by so many well-known people of very different backgrounds and beliefs—Albert Einstein, Albert Schweitzer, Hermann Hesse, Thomas Mann, and many others. As to his effect on perceptions of America, Karl May merely reinforced previously existing images and stereotypes, formed by white Europeans who would have agreed with Theodore Roosevelt’s triumphalist account of civilized whites settling the American West and conquering the Indians. If one wanted to make a fine western omelet, a few eggs necessarily had to be broken. The red Indian, in the eyes of many whites, was not a man but an animal, and therefore expendable. To others, he was human and therefore worthy of being converted to Christianity and civilized. To still others, he was a noble savage, to be left alone and displayed like a museum piece behind the glass of the reservation or ghetto display case. All these strands contributed to the stereotypes Europeans held regarding America. Karl May was no exception, nor was one of his greatest admirers, Adolf Hitler.
Adolf Hitler was even more caught up in the “May cult” than most young Germans of his time. In 1942 he recalled that as a young boy he had read Karl May with a flashlight under his blanket at night or in the moonlight with a large magnifying glass. A friend of his, Fritz Seidl, allegedly told him that the Last of the Mohicans and other Leatherstocking novels were nothing compared to the Karl May stories. So Hitler began to read May, first The Ride through the Desert and then Winnetou and other American westerns.22 Hitler claimed that May stimulated his interest in geography and history. In the figure of the Apache chief Winnetou, whom he commended to German soldiers as a role model, he found an early example of heroic leadership. As chancellor Hitler had a special place reserved in his library for the vellum-bound books of Karl May. He even found enough time to reread May, some seventy volumes in all. In 1944, despite the shortage of paper,
